Due in large part to the emergence of ethical and sexual scandals following the arrival of the “new religions” in the West, “spiritual bypass” was a term coined in order to make sense of how certain spiritual practitioners (again, in the West) could use a spiritual path in order to “go around” their psychological issues without actually addressing them. Therefore, idioms like “Cleaning Up” were invented with the intention of aiding spiritual practitioners in the confrontation and release of their ego tendencies.

In my opinion, there’s been an overcorrection since then as “spiritual bypass” is too often mentioned and thus has become too much of a preoccupation. The truth is that many robust Eastern spiritual paths already have techniques in place to facilitate the letting of psychological stuff. Any robust path has to be involved in “inner purification.”

It seems to me that, at this point in history, a bigger issue than spiritual bypass is what I’ll term “power bypass”: one has misused a spiritual teaching in order to “go around” the feeling of powerlessness. Sadly, this can only engender complacency.

Two illustrations could help to bring this out. First, before the pandemic, I was speaking with someone who was then committing to being a monk at a Buddhist monastery in the United States. I praised him for his commitment to spiritual awakening, and his reply was, in part, that he didn’t feel that he was cut out for making a living in the modern world.

In other words, he hadn’t accessed the great power about which I wrote yesterday. There I defined power as “maximum effectiveness in bringing something about together with minimal resistance.” In this case, he felt ineffective or incompetent, and he wasn’t able to overcome, at least not then anyway, his many resistances.

A second case. Years ago, my wife Alexandra and I met an older couple at a nonduality retreat. It turned out that they had been entrepreneurs who had been hoodwinked by an investor. They lost almost everything. It was only after that event that they turned to spirituality and, it could be argued, they found in “Neo-Advaita” a way of consoling themselves. Misunderstanding the “I am not the doer” teaching, they justified their powerlessness by appealing–erroneously so–to the teaching. I’ve also referred to this particular mistake as “mental hijacking.”

If, then, we are not going to “power bypass,” we need to return to basics. We must learn how to cultivate inner power for it is this sort of subtle power that makes possible beautiful artworks, new businesses, and, not the least, genuine spiritual progress.